Today's Video

Have You Watch Mars Align starry Twins on Sunday?

Mars is now a bright
object in the morning sky. For the first three weeks of August, Mars is
in Gemini, then on August 25 it moves into Cancer.

Early-bird stargazers with clear weather on Sunday (Aug. 25) can enjoy
interesting predawn spectacle involving two bright stars and Mars, the
Red Planet.Mars
is currently rising in the east-northeast just before 3:30 a.m. your
local time. The Earth is very slowly catching up with Mars in its orbit
around the sun, yet the Red Planet has not brightened much at all since
early July.

Mars remains at a magnitude +1.6; closer to the ranking of a second
magnitude object. Astronomers measure night-sky object brightness in
terms of magnitude, in which lower numbers denote brighter objects.
Stars and planets with negative number magnitudes are exceptionally
bright. [Amazing Night Sky Photos for August (Gallery)]

The chief reason that Mars has not brightened much lately is that it is
still at a rather large distance from us: 215.6 million miles (346.8
million kilometers) as of Sunday morning. And if you have even a
moderately large telescope,
the disk of Mars remains disappointingly small, just 4 arc seconds
across. You would need a magnification of no less than 450-power to
make Mars look as large the moon looks to us with the unaided eye.
What's really interesting about Mars is the stellar scene that it's
currently passing through. The planet will form a nearly perfectly
straight line with Castor and Pollux, the two brightest stars of the constellation Gemini,
the Twins. On Sunday morning, the trio will align in a
Mars-Pollux-Castor order, running from the southeast (lower left) to
northwest (upper right).
Or, you can go in the other direction. If you extend an imaginary line
through Castor and Pollux, 1.5 times the distance between them and down
toward the horizon, you'll come to Mars. Mars and Castor appear of equal
brightness, while Pollux is about half a magnitude brighter.